France rejects Google appeal

French data privacy regulators took a step towards sanctioning Google by rejecting the company's request to drop a case against it for refusing to clean up information from its search engine results.

Under Europe's so-called right to be forgotten, individuals can ask search engines such as Google and Microsoft's Bing to remove information that appears under a search of their name if it is incorrect, out of date, irrelevant or inflammatory.

Since the European Court of Justice ruling last year that granted this right to European residents, Google has fielded nearly 320,000 requests, granting about 40 percent of them. But it only de-lists the links on European versions of its sites, such as Google.fr or Google.de not globally, meaning the information remains available.